Network management systems are increasingly using events to monitor the state of telecommunication services and networks. Telecommunication events can be of many types and can come from many sources. Typical types are alarms, performance counters, session events, or CDRs. Such events may come from disparate nodes such as base stations, gateways, or routers, and may use different transport mechanisms such as Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) Integration Reference Points (IRP), Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP), or Network Configuration Protocol (NETCONF). Events are an important source of information for network management systems. In recent years, the number of events generated by networks from these traditional sources has greatly increased and event-based mechanisms are now used to provide information on network and service state and sessions, traditionally the domain of performance counters.
FIG. 1 shows an example telecommunication management system 10 receiving events. An Event Consumption Component (ECC) can consume event streams from each incoming source and applications can use events of certain types in order to provide some functionality. Applications A to N use events from the network 5. The ECC receives events from the network elements in the network 5 and forwards them to the applications.
In general, the set of events required by a particular application such as Application B is a subset of the total set of events available in the ECC. An ECC can maintain a Forwarding List of the events that should be forwarded to each application and only forward those events to each particular application. This Forwarding List may be configured on the ECC or may be built up dynamically if the ECC provides a subscription interface for applications.
In order to scale a system such as that shown in FIG. 1 it is necessary to allow multiple ECC instances and multiple instances of each application to be deployed. Instances may be spread over a number of physical computers. FIG. 2 shows an example of a system with multiple ECC instances and multiple instances of each application. Each ECC instance handles sessions towards a particular set of network elements, which is a subset of the full set of network elements in the managed network 5. Each application instance carries a subset of the total workload of its application. This system is fully-meshed, i.e. each ECC is connected to each application instance. A fully-meshed forwarding scheme between ECC instances and application instances, as in FIG. 2, does not scale beyond very small pool sizes and is impractical for a large network management system. As the number of ECC instances and application instances increase, the event load between adapters and applications increases exponentially because of the massive duplication of events. In systems with even tens of ECC instances and application instances, the event load manifestly becomes unacceptable.
Existing network management systems suffer from one or more possible drawbacks. For example, they may be difficult to scale, or they may only permit scaling on the consumer (ECC) side of the system or on the application side of the system. The manner in which consumers forward to an application, or instances of an application, can require forwarding schemes which are difficult to configure.